The context of the project is the novel Fahrenheit 451, while the physical site is a historical firehouse in Boston. The purpose of the project was to create a firehouse that would fit into the world described by the novel.
The very nature of the firehouse is opposite to what we think today of a firehouse. Its purpose is to ignite, not extinguish fire. The firehouse presents opposite features too. In a place devoted to burning books there is a huge wall with the typed lists of a million forbidden books.
The purpose is to make the firemen as well as the outsiders very aware of their surroundings and the irony in their world. Both the incinerator and the bridge breath and are alive, one through the quality of the fire and the other through the play of light and movement.